Sunday, December 1, 2013

On This Day in History - December 1 Chunnel Breakthrough

Once again, it should be reiterated, that this does not pretend to be a very extensive history of what happened on this day (nor is it the most original - the links can be found down below). If you know something that I am missing, by all means, shoot me an email or leave a comment, and let me know!

Dec 1, 1990: Chunnel makes breakthroughShortly after 11 a.m. on December 1, 1990, 132 feet below the English Channel, workers drill an opening the size of a car through a wall of rock. This was no ordinary hole--it connected the two ends of an underwater tunnel linking Great Britain with the European mainland for the first time in more than 8,000 years. The Channel Tunnel, or "Chunnel," was not a new idea. It had been suggested to Napoleon Bonaparte, in fact, as early as 1802. It wasn't until the late 20th century, though, that the necessary technology was developed. In 1986, Britain and France signed a treaty authorizing the construction of a tunnel running between Folkestone, England, and Calais, France. Over the next four years, nearly 13,000 workers dug 95 miles of tunnels at an average depth of 150 feet (45 meters) below sea level. Eight million cubic meters of soil were removed, at a rate of some 2,400 tons per hour. The completed Chunnel would have three interconnected tubes, including one rail track in each direction and one service tunnel. The price? A whopping $15 billion. After workers drilled that final hole on December 1, 1990, they exchanged French and British flags and toasted each other with champagne. Final construction took four more years, and the Channel Tunnel finally opened for passenger service on May 6, 1994, with Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and France's President Francois Mitterrand on hand in Calais for the inaugural run. A company called Eurotunnel won the 55-year concession to operate the Chunnel, which is the crucial stretch of the Eurostar high-speed rail link between London and Paris. The regular shuttle train through the tunnel runs 31 miles in total--23 of those underwater--and takes 20 minutes, with an additional 15-minute loop to turn the train around. The Chunnel is the second-longest rail tunnel in the world, after the Seikan Tunnel in Japan. Dec 1, 1955: Rosa Parks ignites bus boycotIn Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks is jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, a violation of the city's racial segregation laws. The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Park's historic act of civil disobedience. "The mother of the civil rights movement," as Rosa Parks is known, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913. She worked as a seamstress and in 1943 joined the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). According to a Montgomery city ordinance in 1955, African Americans were required to sit at the back of public buses and were also obligated to give up those seats to white riders if the front of the bus filled up. Parks was in the first row of the black section when the white driver demanded that she give up her seat to a white man. Parks' refusal was spontaneous but was not merely brought on by her tired feet, as is the popular legend. In fact, local civil rights leaders had been planning a challenge to Montgomery's racist bus laws for several months, and Parks had been privy to this discussion. Learning of Parks' arrest, the NAACP and other African American activists immediately called for a bus boycott to be held by black citizens on Monday, December 5. Word was spread by fliers, and activists formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to organize the protest. The first day of the bus boycott was a great success, and that night the 26-year-old Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., told a large crowd gathered at a church, "The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right." King emerged as the leader of the bus boycott and received numerous death threats from opponents of integration. At one point, his home was bombed, but he and his family escaped bodily harm. The boycott stretched on for more than a year, and participants carpooled or walked miles to work and school when no other means were possible. As African Americans previously constituted 70 percent of the Montgomery bus ridership, the municipal transit system suffered gravely during the boycott. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama state and Montgomery city bus segregation laws as being in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. On December 20, King issued the following statement: "The year old protest against city buses is officially called off, and the Negro citizens of Montgomery are urged to return to the buses tomorrow morning on a non-segregated basis." The boycott ended the next day. Rosa Parks was among the first to ride the newly desegregated buses. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his nonviolent civil rights movement had won its first great victory. There would be many more to come. Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005. Three days later the U.S. Senate passed a resolution to honor Parks by allowing her body to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.Dec 1, 1964: Johnson Administration makes plans to bomb North VietnamIn two crucial meetings (on this day and two days later) at the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top-ranking advisers agree, after some debate, to a two-phase bombing plan for North Vietnam. Phase I would involve air strikes by Air Force and Navy jets against infiltration routes and facilities in the Laotian panhandle. Phase II would extend the air strikes to a larger selection of targets in North Vietnam. The more "hawkish" advisers--particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff--preferred a more immediate and intensive series of raids against many targets in North Vietnam, while "dovish" advisers questioned whether bombing was going to have any effect on Hanoi's support of the war. Johnson agreed with the Joint Chiefs on the necessity of bombing, but wanted to take a more gradual and measured approach. When he agreed to the bombing plan, President Johnson made it clear that South Vietnamese leaders would be expected to cooperate and pull their government and people together if they hoped to receive additional aid from the United States. Johnson was concerned that the continuing political instability in Saigon would have a detrimental effect on the South Vietnamese government's ability to pursue the fight against the communist Viet Cong.Dec 1, 1919: New state declared in the BalkansThree weeks after the armistice, and on the same day that Allied troops cross into Germany for the first time, a new state is proclaimed in Belgrade, Serbia. As the great Austrian and German empires were brought low in defeat, the new "Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes" sprung to life, bolstered by the League of Nations promised support for Europe s minority populations. Included in the new state were 500,000 Hungarians and an equal number of Germans, as well as tens of thousands of Romanians, Albanians, Bulgarians and Italians. Crown Prince Alexander, the son of the ailing king of Serbia who had commanded Serbian armies in the Great War, was named regent of the provisional government of the new state. In 1921, with the support of the Serbian representatives in the government and against the opposition of Croatian federalists, who favored a broader distribution of power, a new constitution was put into effect that created a strong central government; Alexander became king after his father died that same year. Tensions continued to mount with the Serbian-dominated government s denial of autonomy to different ethnic groups, notably the Croats and Slovenes, and in the summer of 1928, in response to the fatal shooting of the Croatian leader Stjepan RadiÆ and two colleagues by a Montenegrin deputy in the national parliament, the Croatians withdrew from parliament and organized a separatist regime based in Zagreb. In January 1929, with the nation on the brink of civil war, Alexander suspended the constitution, dissolved the parliament and all political parties, and took dictatorial control of the country. As part of his effort to impose national unity on the country s warring ethnic groups, he renamed the country Yugoslavia. Conflict continued to simmer in the Balkans, however, and in 1934, Alexander was assassinated by extreme right-wing Croatian nationalists during a state visit to Marseilles, France. His son, Peter, managed to maintain unity until 1941, when the German army invaded Serbia and Croatia declared its independence.Dec 1, 1830: Due date for Victor HugoAccording to an agreement with his publisher, French novelist Victor Hugo is due to turn in a draft of his book Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) on this day in 1830. However, Hugo applies himself to other projects, extends the deadline several times, and the book is not published until 1831. Hugo, who had decided to be a writer during his early teens, published his first collection of poetry in 1822, for which he won a pension from Louis XVIII. Also in 1822, Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adele Foucher, with whom he would have numerous children. The following year, Hugo published his first novel, Han d'Islande. His 1827 play Cromwell embraced the tenets of Romanticism, which he laid out in the play's preface. The following year, despite his contract to write Notre Dame de Paris, he set to work on two plays. The first, Marion de Lorme (1829), was censored for its candid portrayal of a courtesan. The second, Hernani, became the touchstone for a bitter and protracted debate between French Classicists and Romantics. He finally finished Notre Dame de Paris, which pled for tolerance of the imperfect and the grotesque in 1831. The book also had a simpler agenda: to increase appreciation of old Gothic structures, which had become the object of vandalism and neglect. In the 1830s, Hugo wrote numerous plays, many of them vehicles for his mistress, the actress Juliette Drouet. In 1841, Hugo was elected to the prestigious Acadamie Francaise. Two years later, he lost his beloved daughter and her husband when they were drowned in an accident. He expressed his profound grief in a poetry collection called Les Contemplations (1856). When Napoleon III came to power, Hugo was forced to flee France and did not return for 20 years. While still in exile, he completed Les Miserables (1862), which became a hit in France and abroad. He returned to Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and was hailed a national hero. Hugo's writing career spanned more than six decades. He was buried in the Pantheon after his death in 1885.

Here's a more detailed look at events that transpired on this date throughout history:

772 - Pope Adrian I elected

800 - Charlemagne judges the accusations against Pope Leo
III in the Vatican.

2001 - Captain Bill Compton brings Trans World Airlines
Flight 220, an MD-83, into St. Louis International Airport bringing to an end
76 years of TWA operations following TWA's purchase by American Airlines.

2012 - 8 people are killed and 36 injured after a bus
overturns in Bolivia

1835 - Hans Christian Andersen published his first book of fairy tales. 1909 - The Pennsylvania Trust Company, of Carlisle, PA, became the first bank in the in the U.S. to offer a Christmas Club account. 1913 - Ford Motor Co. began using a new movable assembly line that ushered in the era of mass production. 1913 - The first drive-in automobile service station opened, in Pittsburgh, PA. 1919 - Lady Astor was sworn in as the first female member of the British Parliament. 1925 - The Locarno Pact finalized the treaties between World War I protagonists. 1934 - Sergei M. Kirov, a collaborator of Joseph Stalin, was assassinated at the Leningrad party headquarters. 1941 - In the U.S., the Civil Air Patrol was created. In April 1943 the Civil Air Patrol was placed under the jurisdiction of the Army Air Forces. 1942 - In the U.S., nationwide gasoline rationing went into effect. 1943 - In Teheran, leaders of the United States, the USSR and the United Kingdom met to reaffirm the goal set on October 30, 1943. The previous meeting called for an early establishment of an international organization to maintain peace and security. 1952 - In Denmark, it was announced that the first successful sex-change operation had been performed. 1955 - Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, AL, refused to give up her seat to a white man. Mrs. Parks was arrested marking a milestone in the civil rights movement in the U.S. 1959 - 12 countries, including the U.S. and USSR, signed a treaty that set aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve, which would be free from military activity. 1965 - An airlift of refugees from Cuba to the United States began. 1969 - The U.S. government held its first draft lottery since World War II. 1984 - A remote-controlled Boeing 720 jetliner was deliberately crashed into California's Mojave Desert to test an anti-flame fuel additive. The test proved to be disappointing. 1986 - U.S. President Ronald Reagansaid he would welcome an investigation of the Iran-Contra affair if it were recommended by the Justice Department. 1987 - NASA announced four companies had been given contracts to help build a space station. The companies were Boeing Aerospace, G. E.'s Astro-Space Division, McDonnell Douglas Aeronautics, and Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International. 1989 - Dissidents in the Philippine military launched an unsuccessful coup against Corazon Aquino's government. 1989 - East Germany's Parliament abolished the Communist Party's constitutional guarantee of supremacy. 1990 - Iraq accepted a U.S. offer to talk about resolving the Persian Gulf crisis. 1990 - British and French workers digging the Channel Tunnel finally met under the English Channel. 1991 - Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for independence from the Soviet Union. 1992 - Russian President Boris Yeltsin survived an impeachment attempt by hard-liners at the opening of the Russian Congress. 1994 - The U.S. Senate gave final congressional approval to the 124-nation General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. 1998 - Exxon announced that it was buying Mobil for $73.7 billion creating the largest company in the world to date.

1824 The presidential election between John Q. Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Crawford, and Henry Clay was turned over to the House of Representatives due to the lack of an electoral-vote majority. 1887 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes appeared for the first time in print in the story "A Study in Scarlet." 1955 Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her front-section bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala. 1959 Twelve nations, including the United States, signed a treaty setting aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve free from military activity. 1997 Representatives from more than 150 countries gathered at a global warming summit in Kyoto, Japan, and over the course of ten days forged an agreement to control the emission of greenhouse gases. President Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. 1998 Exxon and Mobil agreed to merge, creating the world's largest corporation.